I enjoy collecting banknotes, coins, stamps and antique items. I just the ordinary person like you that want to share my little experience and collections.

Monday, May 10, 2010

Charcoal Irons 6 - Seterika arang lama

3 smalls and 1 large charcoal irons. All made from brass material.Very nice for your display collection.

Price:RM800 for 4 pcs

Ironing History

Charcoal iron

Cluster of solid metal irons, heated from the single source.Metal pans filled with charcoal were used for smoothing fabrics in China in the 1st century BC. From the 17th century, sadirons or sad irons (from an old word meaning solid) began to be used. They were thick slabs of cast iron, delta-shaped and with a handle, heated in a fire. These were also called flat irons. A later design consisted of an iron box which could be filled with hot coals, which had to be periodically aerated by attaching a bellows. In Kerala in India, burning coconut shells were used instead of charcoal, as they have a similar heating capacity. This method is still in use as a backup device since power outage is frequent. Other box irons had heated metal inserts instead of hot coals. Another solution was a cluster of solid irons that were heated from the single source: as the iron currently in use cools down, it can be quickly replaced by another one that is hot. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were many irons in use which were heated by a fuel such as kerosene, alcohol, whale oil, natural gas, carbide gas (acetylene) as with carbide lamps, or even gasoline. Some houses were equipped with a system of pipes for distributing natural gas or carbide gas to different rooms in order to operate appliances such as irons, in addition to lights. Despite the risk of fire, liquid-fuel irons were sold in U.S. rural areas up through World War II. On 16 February 1858 W. Vandenburg, and J. Harvey, patented an ironing board that made pressing sleeves and pant legs easier (U.S. Patent 19,390 ). In the industrialized world, these designs have been superseded by the electric iron, which uses resistive heating from an electric current. The hot plate, called the sole plate, is made of aluminium or stainless steel. The heating element is controlled by a thermostat which switches the current on and off to maintain the selected temperature. The invention of the resistively heated electric iron is credited to Henry W. Seely of New York in 1882. In the same year an iron heated by a carbon arc was introduced in France, but was too dangerous to be successful. The early electric irons had no easy way to control their temperature, and the first thermostatically controlled electric iron appeared in the 1920s. Later, steam was used to iron clothing. Credit to the invention of the steam iron goes to Thomas Sears. The world's largest collection of irons, encompassing 1300 historical examples of irons from Germany and the rest of the world, is housed in Gochsheim Castle, near Karlsruhe, Germany.